Unless I am blind or my search-fu is hugely failing me, I cannot for the life of me find any information on the recommended/minimum specs to self-host the matrix backend services. I’m trying to spin up a VM just to play around with it and see if I like it. Specifically, I’m looking at Synapse or Continuwuity. Any advice?
Looking for vCPUs, memory, storage.
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I have ran Synapse natively on 1 CPU 1GB RAM VPS for years. But it fills up a lot of disk space, eapecially with larger rooms, so get at least 100GB? (I had 20GB on my VPS, and with 4 regular users, was using up 15GB)
If you are looking at (new) official ESS Community, they recommend 2 CPU, 2GB RAM minimum for Kubernetes.
You can set it to use object storage instead, much cheaper
Continuwuity… Don’t use synapse, too bloated.
This. Its not that hard to setup.
I’m eager to try out multiple things. Right now I’d settle for whichever I can get set up. The documentation for continuwuity is a little tough for me and my setup right now.
If that’s hard, good luck with synapse then.
Thanks, I’ll probably need it! I seem to be able to follow along a little bit better with Synapse at least, and there’s more troubleshooting stuff out there for it I think because it’s more widely used.
Conduit, around 100 users, barely breaks 0% usage in a Intel i5 micro PC. RAM is around 1GB used.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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Most of the requirements are going to be for the database, and that depends on:
- How many active users you expect
- How many large rooms you or your users join
I left many of the large Matrix spaces I was in, and mine is now mostly just 1:1 chats or a group chat with a handful of friends. Given that low-usage case, I can run my server on a Pi 3 with 4 GB of RAM quite comfortably. I don’t do that in practice, but I do have that setup as a backup server - it periodically syncs the database from my main server - and works fine. The bottleneck there, really, is the SD card storage since I didn’t want an external SSD hanging off of it.
Even when I was active in several large Matrix spaces/rooms, a USFF Optiplex with a quad core i5, 8 GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD was more than enough to run it comfortably alongside some other services like LibreTranslate.
I’d like to set up a matrix server on my home server (or a xmpp server) but I haven’t been able to figure how to do that. All the docs talk about setting up a vps with a domain name.I don’t have a vps or a domain name and don’t wanna have to pay monthly to a hobby. (I’m poor in a poor country)
any internet connected server should do but you will need a domain name as they’re how your matrix server identifies itself to the network
Cool! Can I use a ddns like duckdns? I only use my server through a VPN so I haven’t looked into hardening and security stuff to open it to the internet yet. Maybe I’ll just try setting a matrix server soon. Thanks!
theoretically yeah but you might have some issues with blocklists on other servers. there are cheap domain names available if even $1/yr is an option for you https://gen.xyz/1111b
edit to add- if you buy a domain from cloudflare or any other domain registrar with an API, you can create your own dynamic DNS by running a script on your server to update the domain’s DNS automatically in a similar way to duckdns. more reading available at https://github.com/ddclient/ddclient
Why the hell people keep saying Continuwity. I can’t find any software with that name. Do they mean Conduit? I’m so confused. The two words are nothing alike.
It’s a fork of a fork or Conduit.
Got it.
Ty. I searched on DDG and no results came up. I need to find a new search engine.
It was genuinely hard for me to find on DDG as well. It kept trying to correct to “continuity” >_>
As others have already alluded to, Matrix is a bit odd in that regard as it runs a distributed database and the resource requirements depend on how much of the matrix network is mirrored on it. A single power-user can cause huge resource use just by connecting to a lot of federated active rooms. On the other hand a server that is mostly used as a private family chat can run on a modern RasberryPI without much problems.
Synapse or Conduwinity etc. makes little difference in praxis as both need to do the same database merging operations.
I do appreciate that, but even a starting point would be nice.
Starting point based on what? Do you plan to use it personally to join many large channels from FOSS projects? If so, you need to plan for a relativrly beefy VPS, like 4 core, 8gb ram, 100gb+ ssd storage.
But for small private chats with no federation a cheap minimum VPS can work.
If you want my personal recommendation I would avoid hosting Matrix. A well federated server is costly to run and not really worth the hassle and a small private chat server with bridges etc can be done equally well or better with XMPP.
I did not ask for a recommendation of if I should use or not use Matrix. I stated in OP that I want to play around with it. I will decide if it’s right for my use-case.
